SoftWater

i’m half in love with you, but that’s what makes this dangerous. the other half is dark and evasive, creaking with out-weighed possibilities, some thin wrists of an almost-was that we’ve already kissed goodbye. you’re good at this, the way you wade around the words. i dive right into them, let them press against my lips before they’re gone forever. we were young once and summer struck, drunk off the sea level and the humidity. sometimes i see you and remember a time when we were full and sleepless, when we were loud and pounding. it’s so easy to be overwhelmed by a feeling when it’s foreign and unused. but years later when it gets broken in, when it’s french quartered and gleaming like broken glass in your skin, it’s a lot more complex to love. to try to explain to anyone else. so you keep it in soft-spoken places where no one ever looks. you keep it to remember there are things that make you feel both lonely and alive, this soft paradox you’ve learned to keep close. and i remember a time when your words would kiss my throat, before you out grew me and the quiet things you felt for me. i see you and remember a moment suspended in some morning-lit room. falling asleep to your voice, yawning miscellaneous favorite words, folding the secrets of a forgiver into a forgetter. it’s both sad and lovely how the things we feel at nightfall are never the same by the sunrise. and i know you’re leaving when you wake up. you know i’ll walk the other way when you do. we know we’ll tangle up somewhere, look at each other like no one could ever love the other better, and then we’ll disappear. kiss the guilt off our face, bury this in the ground and pick the flowers that grow from the grave. somehow the love we felt when we were younger never fully disappears, it just disperses into a thousand different corners of strangers we chase after. looking for a feeling that’s never far but always fleeting. nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, you know. it twists and it turns and chokes, and sometimes in the right moments i start to think your words could still kiss my throat. i start thinking that i could maybe pick out all of this glass between us, all of the fragments of feelings chained between us, i could maybe see you without all of the carefully chosen words we’ve been tip-toeing around for years. and i’m looking at you trying to see the parts i keep missing, but the sun’s always in my eyes. and you don’t mind. you never mind.